We are having a facelift in August. The space, not us fags! We have a lot of things we need to find a new home for. Things such as tables, chairs, filing cabinets, outdoor furniture, stools, cups, paper, cutlery, plates, cushions, books, clothing, building materials and much much more.

Come bag a bargain at the fag. We will also be offering a selection of limited-edition prints for sale – with a special 20% discount off the RRP on the day.

There will be tea and coffee, cake and the barbie will be fired up for a lazy sunday brunch in the sun.

This March the Press printed a job with and hosted an event for the Centre For Deep Reading. The Centre is an organisation initiated by Nick Keys & Ella Skilbeck-Porter dedicated to deepening the reading practices of contemporary writers and readers in general.

The Print Job – Patron Saint Cards & Bookmarks

Illustrations and calligrams by David Sater, and designed by BFP veteran and certified digital guru Patrick Armstrong, the CDR print job produced the first two in a series of Patron Saint cards as well as event-specific bookmarks.

On March 25th, The Press opened its doors to CDR for Lispectors, a group reading event dedicated to the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. In the above photo, Lispectors rehearse at the press before the reading.

Lispectors then moved a few archways down to the band room where they encircled Emma Ramsay’s binaural microphone. Livestreamed as part of Source Material, the Lispectors broadcast was a one-hour improvised group poetry reading with 13 voices in 3 different languages. The 13 readers worked thematically through material from all of Clarice Lispector’s body of work, including commentary by Helene Cixous. The raw audio file can be heard here and an edited and produced version will soon be forthcoming.

MAKING SOAP WITH WILD PLANTS- May 20-21

Learn how to make cold processed soap infused with the plants growing in your garden

Soap making is an age-old skill that anyone can learn. Join wild plants expert Diego Bonetto and soap-maker extraordinaire Lisa Norris for two days on an empowering experience: learn how to safely recognise common medicinal plants growing in your garden and use them in soap!

Diego is an edible weeds advocate renown for his offering of urban foraging workshops. Building on the knowledge acquired while growing up on a farm in Italy, Diego introduce people to the ever-present food and medicine plants that surround us. He collaborates extensively with chefs, herbalists, environmentalists and cultural workers promoting new understanding of what the environment has to offer.

Lisa has been making soap for over 7 years and since 2012 is presenting her creations as Kangaroo Apple Studio. Her love for natural products have pushed her to experiment while thoroughly enjoying the process. She has a wealth of information and is a great teacher. Kangaroo Apple Soap Studio has won a number of international soap challenges and was recently awarded first prize in the Collaboration Challenge of the international Soap Challenge Club.

WHAT WE WILL DO

Day one Saturday 20 May 9:30am-2pm

During the first day you will learn how a cold process batch of soap is made, using natural vegetable oils and prepared plant infused oils. You will then participate in making soap under supervision. You will do this in groups of three, so that everyone will have an hands-on experience of the process. We will have a lunch break and plenty of time to answer all of your questions. We will then put the soap to bed and leave it to saponify overnight.

Day two Sunday 21 May 10am-2pm

We will start the day with a walk when we will discover and learn how to positively identify the most common medicinal plants living in anyone’s garden. We will learn about dandelion, chickweed, plantain, dock, castor oil plant and more. We will then show you how to infuse them into oils for use in a new batch of soap.
After a lunch break we will unmould our soap made the previous day, cut the bars and share the results.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

– how to safely handle ingredients including lye (sodium hydroxide)
– what equipment is needed
– what can be used as moulds
– about some oils commonly used in soap making and their properties
– how to use a lye calculator to formulate your own soap recipes

This workshop will empower you with the confidence to make more soap at home, experimenting with different ingredients, fragrances, exfoliants and colours. Soap making can be very addictive, with endless possibilities for creativity!

THE COSTS: $160 for two days of five hours each of information packed workshop with notes and soap bars that you make to take home. We will provide coffee and tea facilities but please bring your own lunch. There is also a discount for pensioner and underemployed and a two-for-one ticket so that you can come along with your friend in soap!

During 2016, we had the pleasure of welcoming Audrey Qin from China to work with us on the project of cataloguing and archiving John Demos’ huge body of work. Audrey was an exchange student at Sydney College of the Arts, and we loved working with her. Upon her return to China, Audrey sent us a letter about her experiences with Big Fag, which we reprint below.

Thanks so much Audrey, please come back and join us again soon!

– the Big Fag Press team.

– – –

Dear Big Fag Press,

Thank you very much for the time we spent together. For me, a short-term exchange student, it was such a blessing to join this passionate big family and get a fantastic insight about some interesting issues in the Australian art scene. With approximately zero pre-experience in the art industry, I joined the team as a volunteer at the end of the June 2016 and left with fruity art world experience.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the late artist John Demos’ art work almost accidentally, when I enquired about those storage boxes laying out in our ‘warehouse’. From then on, I started to get to know this extremely talented and unique artist — John Demos.

Between June and October of 2016, I devoted myself to take care of the inventory of John’s legacy. It was such a privilege to go through the whole process of making the inventory. My instructor Diego and I decided to take pictures of every valuable item of John’s old art works and belongings and record them using Google spreadsheets. It was like an amazing treasure hunt, when we actually took everything out and examined them in detail. Eye catching images kept popping out with forms I’ve never perceived before. However when things came to which item to keep and which to cast off, no one in the team seemed to feel authority enough to make the call.

Although with a natural sense of art, John was caught up by schizophrenia for most of his life. He creates art work such as repeatedly well organised chalk letters on blackboard, repeated words on giant pieces of paper, colourful or pure black ink strokes on paper, etc. Some of them are already covered by dust yet with a sense of decay which can be John’s personal touch and the idea that he wanted his works to convey at the first place.

In my personal opinion, there are two kinds of artist in the modern world — one is making art only for themselves while another is doing things mainly for the mass public. It’s about the personal drive of making art which is divided into an intrinsic drive and an extrinsic drive. If I put my feet in their shoes, as an intrinsic driven artist, it doesn’t matter if my art work can be appreciated by other people because it is the process of making art what matters to me; however, to be an extrinsic driven artist, presenting the art works is crucial, for audiences are the major group to communicate with. Thus, in John Demos’ case, making art released the nerves and expressed his feelings of the world. Perhaps John never wanted these works we uncovered to be exhibited. But once an artist wants to acknowledge their talent or effort, they need find a way to approach the audience. Extrinsic artists want to make their works ‘popular’ in an exclusive way. It comes back to my personal interest — how to bring traditional culture back to the stage without turning it into a soulless commercial product or compressing it into souvenirs.

I wanted to help out at Big Fag Press in the very beginning because of the bursting passion of art within the group members. The art industry is a tough world to live in. I feel Big Fag Press is somewhere between an art club and a not-for-profit business. During my internship timeframe, I had the privilege to witness its AGM (Annual General Meeting) and I was also allowed to bring two of my friends along. It was a mind-blowing experience for me with an executive board formed by people from all kinds of different job background. The team roles are assigned by the whole group all together. Although most of them in the board have another job, being artists is their common identity and the definition of passion. It is such a blessing to be in part of the amazing team.

Big thanks to Big Fag Press! I will catch up with the work on John’s project after I go back to China. Please keep me posted about your progress as well.

We are very lucky to have emerging artist Giorgia Severi all the way from Italy in residence at the press for the next three weeks.

Giorgia will be working form the Big Fag Press studio producing works for two exhibitions in Sydney, at MContemporary and the Italian Institute of Culture.
While here we will also offer a collaborative workshop with Giorgia and artist/forager Diego Bonetto, two days learning about medicinal and edible wild plants and producing beautiful monotypes using ink and natural sap. Sat 29 and Sun 30 October.

Giorgia is not new to Australia, having spent several months here working with remote communities to produce works that were then exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
A special treat for us, come by and say hi or join the workshop and learn about how to produce your very own plant print.

An art exhibition, print collaboration, workshop and performance with the Black Boots collective on their tour of East Coast Australia. Featuring works by Aris Prabawa, Arya Pandjalu, Mochamad Tamzu, Budi Prakosa and Wahyu Jatmiko.

The Medium and the Message
A review of Extrapolate: The Art of John Demos, curated by Lucy Brack, at the Big Fag Press, 30 August – 10 September 2015By Chloé Wolifson

Considered and repetitive mark-making is central to the work of John Demos. Over a 30 year practice employing a variety of media, from the more traditional etching, ceramics, collage and paint to the less conventional but widely available chalk on chalkboard and marker on whiteboard, Demos has created landscapes of the mind, inviting the viewer into his conceptual processes.

Individually Demos’ works are often immersive and can sometimes even feel claustrophobic, however the exhibition Extrapolate: The Art of John Demos at Big Fag Press allowed for breathing room around each work which balanced this effect. The surfaces of most works were covered in the artist’s signature repeated text, including chairs and tables as well as two-dimensional works hung on the walls. The work Whiteboard, Table and Chair, Ensemblage, 1980s consisted of an installation of the aforementioned whiteboard, table and chair, each covered in text – the artist himself conspicuous by his absence in the setting.

The line between practice and final work was regularly blurred, as the temporary nature of chalkboard and whiteboard text abounded, and visitors and Big Fag staff moved about the space which is after all a working studio as well as exhibition space. This provided an atmosphere of warmth to the exhibition.

There is a sense of the personal and subjective in Demos’ arrangement of words which, taken individually and out of context would be devoid of such meaning. The layering of words becomes a mind map, as words such as ‘genius’, ‘ingenious,’ ‘intelligence’ and ‘mentoring’ meld with ‘physics’, ‘quantum leap,’ ‘processing’ and ‘etching’. Just as our internal trains of thought are bound to move synapse-like from one idea to another, connected by tenuous threads which hold their own internal logic, the overall visual effect of these works is of a topography. These vast changing landscapes of text and fields of marks brought to mind those schools of Indigenous Australian painting which depict aerial-like views of the earth. The gradual progression of words also evokes the formation and evolution of habits across time – an internal, psychological typography of its own.

The inclusion of an audio descriptor of the works added an enjoyable layer to the experience of viewing the exhibition. Hearing a male and female voice reciting the words in Demos’ works, distinct, overlapping and sometimes onomatopoeic as they appear on the various surfaces of the works, became a performative element beyond its descriptive qualities.
The development of Demos’ art practice was in evidence across the works in the exhibition, which were dated from the early 1980s up to the present day. However one did not need to look at a catalogue list to understand this history. It was visible in the works themselves, in the conceptual relationships within and between them. And in the 2015 work The Beginning, deliberate yet playfully colourful text marked on a chalkboard signified a freshness and dynamism in Demos’ current practice – signifying that perhaps the best is yet to come.